Dysfunctional Shipping Awareness Month, Days 6&7

[pocochina]

Have y'all missed my stabby pointer finger? I know I have! Adama-grade temper tantrum about some extremely disturbing topics below the cut.

Comments

[boot_the_grime]

There are certainly disturbing aspects of Helo/Athena - the entire way how they got involved - but I think you interpret her character as far more calculating than she is. I found her very sympathetic during season 2. I only started hating her in seasons 3 and 4 when everyone seemed to be treating her as a perfect hero (while Boomer got the opposite treatment and was turned into a scapegoat), while she was becoming more and more hypocritical and auto-racist. And then it culminated with her literally getting away with murder, and it seemed like the writers saw nothing wrong with that.

Laura Roslin, pursuant to her official capacity as a state authority and her ethical obligation as the only grown-up left in the universe, rescued a helpless infant from a mass murderer who spent all of her free time stomping around her cell yelling I REGRET NOTHING!!! and said mass murderer's thoroughly brainwashed accomplice. Um, that bitch? lol@haters.LOL, I can imagine Roslin's PR spinning it all that way if it got found out. :p What happened was

[pocochina]

only started hating her in seasons 3 and 4 when everyone seemed to be treating her as a perfect hero (while Boomer got the opposite treatment and was turned into a scapegoat)

man, I love Boomer. That poor girl. I think Athena's anger at the other Cylons was super-interesting, but it doesn't make her seem sympathetic and righteous to me.

I can imagine Roslin's PR spinning it all that way if it got found out

ha! Consider me Laura Roslin's PR team. favorite ever.

What happened was that Laura Roslin kidnapped a baby from its parents. Pure and simple.This is my thing: that spin on events (and it is spin just as much as my version) gets plenty of airing in the show, and even more airing in fandom. In part because people have a visceral reaction to this, and that's fine, it's a heavily emotional storyline. But *my* spin on events never gets presented except by me, and I think that's in large part because the show is successful in whitewashing Athena and guilting us into losing sight of what she did, to billions of people generally and

[rosaxx50]

people RightShip Helo and Athena. Like, actually think theirs is a beautiful love.

Lolol this is basically me because I do rightship them but I agree with all your points too so idk.

I got halfway through before I realized there were massive spoilers for s4 so I'm bookmarking this one for later as well.

[pocochina]

lol! fair enough. In fairness, I do feel like all of the basic narrative elements of a right!ship are there with them. It's just that the "scare the crap out of me" elements are there too, in a way that seems only rarely acknowledged.

aaah, yeah, all of my posts go through the end of whatever show unless otherwise stated, I probably should've noted that. sorry!

[anonymous]

I realise I am very late to this but I found this post fascinating. I strongly agree with what you're saying here. The Helo-Athena relationship I find massively off putting and I think what is interesting is that in the fourth season until Moore was put under pressure not to kill them off in Daybreak the show finally does really problematise the relationship. If Moore had stuck to his guns it would have been a devastating end to this previously overly romaticised relationship: the relationship is destroyed in StWOM and then the end of it would be death. Throw in the longer version of Islanded in which Athena's utter inability to forgive is made explicit despite the forgiveness that has been shown to her and the knife is twisted very hard. This is set up I think in The Hub where there is actually little difference between Twin Eight and Athena's behaviour - physiologically Athena is no more Hera's mother than Twin Eight is - and Helo is forced to confront the very odd nature of the relationship he has and it is Laura who is allowed

[pocochina]

Thanks for chiming in! There seems to be this odd thing where BSG characters are credited with what they're willing to acknowledge? Like, Helo decides to act as if the world consists of his positive perspective on his family, so people decide this makes him good and lovable. Laura acknowledges that their lives are a disaster, and so she gets blamed for the bad things that are there. Cylons decide that the past is irrelevant to *them*, so when they're around it's all this normative preference for forgive-and-forget. Far being from me to accuse anyone of being a believer in The Secret, but it seems to me there's an expectation of some fierce post-hoc magical thinking going on somewhere, though I can't put my finger on where it comes in. Possibly this is one of those instances where there wasn't sufficient agreement in production and it comes across in a way that really bothers me.

AMoS clearly contrast the solipsism of the Helo-Athena scene with the struggle of responsibility of the Roslin-Adama scene at the end. Helo thinks the fact